Solved: Facebook Ads CPMs Averaging $300+

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! I had a look at the situation you described, and honestly, seeing CPMs that high isn't something to panic about – it's a symptom. It's your ad account telling you that something is fundamentally broken in the strategy, and it's almost never what Meta support tells you it is. It's rarely a technical glitch and almost always a problem with campaign structure, targeting, or the offer itself. I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts and guidance on how we'd approach diagnosing and fixing this. It's a solvable problem, but it requires a very different way of thinking than just adding more audiences or changing a daily budget.

We'll need to look at your Campaign Structure...

Right, let's get straight to the heart of the matter. The "Sam Ovens style" campaign you've described is, frankly, the single biggest reason your CPMs are in the stratosphere. While that kind of hyper-testing can work in very specific scenerios with massive budgets and mature pixels, for a launch campaign on a $10/day ad set budget, it's like trying to power a battleship with a handful of AA batteries. You're not just wasting money; you are actively sabotaging your own auction performance.

Think about how the Meta auction works. It's a dynamic marketplace. You're bidding against other advertisers for the same user's attention. However, with your current setup (5 ad angles x 4 images = 20 ads per audience, across 4+ audiences), you've created a far more dangerous problem: you are bidding against yourself. This is called audience overlap, and you've basically engineered a perfect storm for it. Every one of your ad sets is trying to reach similar people, driving your own bid price up astronomically. The algorithm doesn't have enough data or budget for any single ad to perform efficiently, so it panics and charges you a premium just to show your ad at all.

Furthermore, the Meta learning phase requires about 50 conversions per ad set, per week, to stabilise. At $10 a day ($70 a week), how many "website leads" do you realistically expect to get for one ad set to exit the learning phase? If your Cost Per Lead is, say, $35, you're getting two leads a week. You will never exit the learning phase. Your performance will remain volatile, and your costs will stay sky-high because the algorithm never learns who your ideal customer is. It's just frantically spending your ten quid trying to get *any* result.

This is what a chaotic, high-overlap structure looks like in practice, and it's probably very similar to what's happening in your account right now.

What's the solution? Radical simplification. You need to move to a structure that respects the algorithm and your budget. This usually means a classic funnel approach: Top of Funnel (ToFu), Middle of Funnel (MoFu), and Bottom of Funnel (BoFu). For a launch, you'd focus almost entirely on ToFu.

Instead of four audiences, pick the ONE you believe is your absolute best. Maybe it's your highest quality lookalike or a very specific interest stack. Instead of 20 creatives, pick your 2-3 best ad angles and create one ad for each. Put a proper budget behind that single ad set (e.g., $40/day instead of 4 x $10/day) and let it run. Give the algorithm a clear path and enough fuel to actually do its job. Only once you have a winning, stable ad set do you even think about scaling or testing new audiences.

I'd say you need to rethink your Ideal Customer...

Now, let's talk about those audiences. You mentioned running four lookalikes and some interests. This is a classic case of what I call "throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping it sticks." The problem with this approach is that you're relying on the algorithm to do all the strategic work for you. You're telling it, "here's a list of people, go find more like them." But what if the initial list isn't a perfect representation of your *best* customers? What if it's full of tyre-kickers and people who signed up but never bought? Your lookalikes will just be a more efficient way of finding more of the wrong people.

You have to get out of the mindset of demographics and firmographics. Forget "companies in the tech sector with 100-500 employees." That tells you absolutely nothing useful for writing a compelling ad. Instead, you must define your customer by their pain. Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) isn't a person; it's a problem state. It's a specific, urgent, and expensive nightmare that your product or service solves.

For example, if you're selling project management software, your ICP isn't "Marketing Managers". It's "the Marketing Manager who is terrified of telling her CEO that the product launch is delayed again because her team is drowning in conflicting spreadsheets and endless email chains." See the difference? One is a job title; the other is a career-threatening nightmare.

Once you've isolated that nightmare, your targeting becomes incredibly clear. Where does this person go to find solutions?

• -> What podcasts do they listen to on their commute? (e.g., 'Marketing Over Coffee')
• -> What newsletters do they actually read? (e.g., 'The Hustle', 'Stratechery')
• -> What software tools do they already pay for? (e.g., HubSpot, Salesforce, Slack)
• -> What influencers or thought leaders do they follow on LinkedIn or Twitter? (e.g., Rand Fishkin, Joe Pulizzi)

These are your interests. Not "marketing." That's far too broad. You need to target "HubSpot" or "Asana" as an interest. This is how you pre-qualify your audience. By targeting these niche interests, you ensure your ad is only shown to people already living in the world of your solution. It's the difference between shouting into a crowded stadium and whispering in the ear of the right person. Doing this homework first is non-negotiable. If you haven't done it, you have no business spending a single pound on ads, because you're just guessing.

You probably should fix your Optimisation Goal...

You mentioned you're running for "conversions and website leads." This is the right objective, technically. You're telling Meta to find people who will take a specific action. But this brings up a crucial question: how much is a "website lead" worth? And more importantly, what is the *quality* of that lead?

This is where your client's complaint about "poor deals" comes into sharp focus. The Meta algorithm, when told to get "leads," will find the path of least resistance. It will find people within your audience who are most likely to fill out a form. These are often serial freebie-seekers, people who sign up for everything, or simply those with the lowest commercial intent. You're optimising for a click and a form fill, not for revenue. You're getting exactly what you asked for: leads, but not customers.

To fix this, you need to understand your numbers. The most critical metric you're missing isn't CPM; it's the relationship between your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) and your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). Without this, you're flying blind. You can't know if a £50 lead is a bargain or a disaster.

Let's break down the maths.

• Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What's the average monthly revenue from a client?
• Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue?
• Monthly Churn Rate: What percentage of clients do you lose each month?

Once you know your LTV, you can determine what you can afford to spend to acquire a customer. A healthy LTV:CAC ratio is typically around 3:1. So, if your LTV is £9,000, you can afford to spend up to £3,000 to acquire a new customer. Now, work backwards. If your sales team closes 1 in 10 qualified leads, you can afford to pay up to £300 for a single *qualified* lead.

Suddenly, that high cost per lead from a hyper-targeted LinkedIn campaign doesn't seem so bad, does it? It looks like a profitable investment. This is the math that unlocks intelligent, aggressive growth and frees you from the tyranny of chasing cheap, low-quality leads. Use the calculator below to get a feel for your own numbers.

You'll need an Offer They Can't Ignore...

Finally, we arrive at the most common point of failure for almost every ad campaign: the offer. Your ads, landing page, and call to action are all part of your offer. A high CPM can also be a signal from the market that your message isn't resonating. If people see your ad and scroll right past, Meta's algorithm takes note. It sees low engagement and low click-through rates, assumes your ad is low quality, and charges you a premium to show it to anyone else. Your client's "poor deals" are another piece of this puzzle; it suggests that even the people who *do* click aren't being properly convinced on your landing page.

You need to stop selling your service and start selling a solution to their nightmare. No one wakes up excited to "Request a Demo." That's a high-friction, low-value ask that positions you as just another commodity vendor. Your offer's only job is to deliver a moment of undeniable value—an "aha!" moment that makes the prospect sell themselves on your solution.

How do you do that in your ad copy? You use a proven framework, like Problem-Agitate-Solve.

• Problem: You state the nightmare scenario directly. "Are your ad campaign CPMs spiraling out of control?"
• Agitate: You pour salt in the wound and describe the consequences. "Are you burning through your client's launch budget with nothing to show for it but a dashboard of scary red numbers and a constant feeling of dread?"
• Solve: You introduce your service as the clear, simple solution. "We build simplified, high-intent ad campaigns that slash wasteful spending and attract qualified leads. Stop guessing and start converting."

Or for a product, you use Before-After-Bridge.

• Before: Describe their current world of pain. "Your AWS bill just landed. It's 30% higher than last month, and your engineers have no idea why. Another fire to put out."
• After: Paint a picture of the promised land. "Imagine opening your cloud bill and smiling. You see exactly where every dollar is going, and waste has been automatically eliminated."
• Bridge: Position your product as the vehicle to get them there. "Our FinOps platform is the bridge that gets you there. Start a free trial and find your first £1,000 in savings today."

Notice that none of this copy talks about features. It talks about feelings, frustrations, and transformations. This is what stops the scroll. This is what makes someone click. This is what pre-qualifies them as someone with the exact problem you solve. A powerful offer and compelling copy can often do more to lower your CPMs than any amount of audience testing because it improves your ad's fundamental quality score.

I know this is a lot to take in, and it represents a significant shift from the 'more is more' testing approach you've been using. But the path to lower CPMs and better leads isn't through more complexity; it's through more clarity. Clarity on your structure, clarity on your customer, and clarity on your offer.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:

Trying to manage all these moving parts—strategy, analytics, copywriting, and platform mechanics—is incredibly challenging, especially when you're under pressure from a client. It's often more effective and less costly in the long run to bring in a specialist who has navigated these exact issues hundreds of times before. We can bring an objective, experienced eye to diagnose the root causes quickly and implement a strategy that's built to scale from day one.

If you'd like to have a more in-depth chat, we offer a free, no-obligation initial consultation where we can go through your ad account together and lay out a more detailed, actionable plan. It might be the fastest way to turn things around for your client.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh